AGAPE is a new open-access database which maps the reception of the Greek Church Fathers in print throughout early modern Europe from 1465 to 1600, in the original language, as well as in Latin and vernacular translations. It refines available data and substantially improves their level of detail: not only does it link each work to the ID of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum (CPG), the standard authority in the field, but also thoroughly describes all contents (text as well as paratext) and strictly relies on the analysis of at least one copy of each edition.
Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720 is a four-year UKRI FLF-funded project which seeks to explore the role of medical practitioners in the early years of the slave trade, and the relationship their practical experiences had to early modern ideas of ‘race’.
This project aims to uncover and analyze practical medical attitudes to enslaved and free Black Africans in early modern Europe, and in early modern Europeans’ global encounters. It addresses several key research questions:
How did medical practitioners contribute to the earliest global encounters?
What role did they play in the increasingly systematic enslavement of African peoples, both in Europe and in the New World?
Did African communities provide alternative medical treatments, and if so, how did European medicine encounter and react to these practices?
How did medical treatment of “foreign bodies” inform practitioners’ attitudes to human difference? How did medical conceptions of difference inform developing ideas “race”?
The archive holds information on over 275 Latinx-themed and/or authored plays and productions of western classics, including Shakespeare, Greek and Roman plays, the Spanish Golden Age, and more. It includes, photographs, reviews, ephemera, and resources. The site has reviews from over 25 contributors and growing. Launched in February 2023.
The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). It provides users the tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, orphanage, publishing house, and the like were located in China, and it documents who worked inside those buildings, both foreign and Chinese. Collectively, this information creates spatial maps and generates relational networks that reveal where, when, and how Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China. Simultaneously, it uncovers how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices were conveyed to the West.
IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive is redesigned, and back online. IDEA includes manuscript visualizations, videos, and a virtual model of Isabella d’Este’s famous studiolo as well as a Zotero bibliography of materials relating to Isabella and the Italian Renaissance. See IDEA’s News link for book announcements and other relevant notices.
This online exhibition consists of 93 different documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian and Armenian, from archives in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Egypt and Malta, all of which house paper-based records of administrative, financial and commercial activity between the late fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The exhibition thus samples some of the most relevant paper-based formats and documentary genres used to codify commercial information and financial value by different communities around the Mediterranean.
The exhibition was organized by José María Pérez Fernández (U. of Granada), Giovanni Tarantino (U. of Florence) Matteo Calcagni (European University Institute), as one of the activities conducted by “Paper in Motion”, which was in turn one of the four Work Groups of the PIMo COST Action. People in Motion (PIMo): Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492–1923)
Urus is a guide for academics and general users interested in the themes of production and reception of prints in Poland, Lithuania, and Prussia from the 15th to the 17th centuries. The database takes its name from the aurochs — or urus in Latin — a now-extinct species of large wild cattle whose habitat in the 16th century was already limited to remote corners of Eastern European forests. The ambition of the Urus project is to collect hitherto insufficiently explored instances of Early Modern printmaking and print consumption in Poland, Lithuania, and Prussia. The database provides an insight into robust East and Central European material, both textual and iconographic, and its far-reaching connections.
The making of Urus brought together members of two scientific projects led by Professor Grażyna Jurkowlaniec and funded by the National Science Centre, Poland: “Reframed Image: Reception of Prints in the Kingdom of Poland from the End of the Fifteenth to the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century” (2016–2020) and “Matrix of Confusion: The Production of Woodcut Illustrations in Poland–Lithuania and Prussia until the Early Seventeenth Century” (2019–2023).
The project Magnetic Margins investigates how and by whom the most important early modern book publications on magnetism were read and annotated. This database provides a census of major publications in this field of study and maps annotations in the individual copies of these editions.
Rara Magnetica (1269-1599) is the name of Gustav Hellmann’s well known anthology published in 1898. With this collection, he sought to provide access to some of the earliest, yet rare publications in the field of geomagnetism that predated William Gilbert’s landmark publication De Magnete of 1600. The digital project and platform Rara Magnetica translates these efforts into the digital domain, going far beyond digital editions.
The need to publish important but understudied sources is most efficiently achieved by providing curated digital structured and linked data. Rara Magnetica hence – as an ongoing project – is both a repository and an interactive research platform. It publishes scans and transcriptions of (many hitherto unpublished) sources, data visualizations, and databases, all related to the premodern study of magnetism. Moreover, it provides various tools to investigate each of these resources independently and in combination. A major aim in fact is to enhance multimodal analyses that transcend media barriers by allowing to research imagery along with full texts, material sources along with their conceptual content. This is achieved by various but interlinked tools providing different ways of looking at the same sources.
The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project recreates two full days in St Paul’s Cathedral — an ordinary (or ferial) day, the Tuesday after the First Sunday in Advent in 1625 and a Festival Day, Easter Sunday in 1624. These services reflect, in the choice of music and in other ways, differences in style of performance reflecting the difference between a festival, or special occasion and an ordinary, everyday occasion.
The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project contains resources for understanding worship in English cathedrals and parish churches in the early seventeenth century. Chief among them are auralized recordings of the services appointed for use every day of the year — the Divine Services of Morning Prayer (Matins) and Evening Prayer (Evensong) — as well as services appointed for a narrower range of days — (the Great Litany, appointed for Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays and Holy Communion, appointed for Sundays and Holy Days).
